Dear B——,
The painting that hung on the wall of your mother Susan’s childhood bedroom shook every time your grandparents fought. Susan could see it from her bed: ten years old and piled in chessboard afghans, cloth doll lost among the fevered tangles of her limbs. She kept her eyes fixed on the painting, tried to breathe, tried to let her mind float, like she was trying to get over hiccups. If she could banish every thought, her mother wouldn’t scream anymore—wordless ragged screams that went on until her breath ran out—and her father wouldn’t pound his fist on his desk as if he were trying to pound her mother to nothing, as if her mother wasn’t already nothing—and the painting wouldn’t vibrate. But Susan must have failed, because it did.
Her father had a very stressful job: we rebuilt the whole city, he would say to her when she asked him what he did, where their money came from. At first, she thought he’d personally rebuilt it—he was tall and broad, qualities that would one day seep into you and your brothers—but then she learned that he meant the loans and investments he’d brokered had paid other people to rebuild it. It still seemed impressive: like he’d clapped his foot, and gold rose out of the land to serve him. He’d promised Susan’s mother that if she tied her life to his, if she came west with him to California, to this city that the earth had flattened out—the perfect opportunity Nature created, he’d say, find something broken down to nothing and build it up again—he would always take care of her. He reminded her of this promise often. He hadn’t signed up for what she became.
Susan couldn’t remember a time before her mother’s silences, although she knew there must have been one. Her mother never spoke, never met eyes, glided from room to room in silence while servants went ahead of her, accomplishing whatever she needed to accomplish. Her illness felt regal: queen following drones. Sometimes Susan would be reading on the couch, noodling on the piano, and she’d find her shoulders growing cold and still. And she’d turn to find her mother there, watching her. Sometimes she ducked away from her mother’s stare, and sometimes she tried to meet it. But her mother could stare like no one else—a level, smoldering stare, almost vibrating in its intensity, reading your mind—and Susan could never match it for long.
Her mother had decorated the house, continued to decorate it: moved furniture in the night, hung and took down artwork, so that Susan would wake up and enter the living room and for a moment believe herself transported to another house altogether. The paintings her mother hung always fascinated Susan. Paint itself fascinated her: Venetian stone, pulverized and suspended in linseed, pigments layered too thickly to grasp the meaning of right away: value and hue resolved into figures, then dissolved into value and hue again. You could watch for the moment of change without quite catching it. Later in life—in the house in Hawthorne, her sons moved away, alone in her world that you can not see—Susan would, when unobserved, drag herself to the porch steps, sit slumped with her back to her house, and stare at the leaves of the trees across the sidewalk: she focused and unfocused her eyes, trying to turn them into paint and back.
The overwhelming quality oil paint had, like overdubbed recordings: a sound so large and complicated you can forget yourself within it. You can hide.
Her mother was the one who’d chosen the painting in Susan’s room; Susan was sure of that. The painting was a kind of Bloomsbury production in blue and gray, a woman in the middle distance who gazed at a young man bent over a desk and scribbling at papers. The woman looked at the man, steadied herself against the door frame as she watched him. It was a bizarre selection for a child’s bedroom. And it was a mystery: like a panel in a newspaper comic sliced free of context, a secret narrative gift that floated to Susan from her mother’s castle in the moon.
Her mother was a goddess of the sky. Her father was a god of the world. Susan was nothing, hiding in her room while they clashed and the picture frame shook. Her father had rebuilt the city from the earthquake: maybe he was the only thing holding it together now. Maybe her mother could scream so loud that her father would disappear, and all the demons of the earth would run loose.
If her parents were gods, how was she supposed to take care of them?
She felt almost silly the first time she prayed to the painting. Just the barest whisper—please stop shaking, if you stop shaking, I will do whatever you say; I will give you whatever I have—so low no one could hear it, if anyone was even listening to her. But the painting kept shaking—they kept fighting, below—so she whispered it again, louder.
Any ritual action, repeated, becomes stronger: every time a band rehearses, it becomes tighter; every time a hit song is played on the radio, the magic embedded within its harmonies soaks that much more intensely into the weave of the world. So the second time Susan prayed, her parents stopped. Below, she could hear her mother sob, her father speaking lower than she could understand. She stared at the painting. Still, it stared back.
Thank you, she whispered, honoring the bargain she must have made.
She continued to pray, growing louder and more confident, and the words of her prayers began to lift away from the earth of mere prose, gained melodies and directions. She sang her prayers whenever her parents fought, sang them sometimes even when they were quiet, insurance against the next fight. She added motions; she marked out the four quarters of her room, circled from one to another: painting, oil lamp, flower in pitcher of water, window facing north over the slow and rising hills. She sent up her prayer in each place. She traced designs in the air: this design was her mother, this one was her father. Be at peace, she begged. Be at peace. Be merciful; be loved.
She thought, one night long after the sun was down and the moon was full and high, unable to sleep and pacing the quarters in her nightshirt: my mother went insane. Now I’m praying to a painting. Does that mean that what happened to her is happening to me, too? Does madness transmit by blood, just like hair color, like height? Sin passes from generation to generation: the work of each generation, then, is to renew the generation that will come after it. The child is the father of the man. The maiden gives birth to the mother, to the crone. So am I going to go insane too? Will my children?
The disease took her three days later: kneeling in prayer, she tried to get up and found her legs full of needles, her head fogging to gray when she tried to stand. A servant found her unconscious; doctors were summoned. No one told her what the doctors told her father; she was sure it was one of the terrifying diseases with the short names: polio, dropsy, scarlet fever; moontouch, whisp, alkali muddle. She was sure they expected the disease either to cripple her or kill her, or both. She stretched across the bed, not expecting to get up from it again. Her father sat at the foot of the bed, speechless, looking over her and silent. He wasn’t hitting anything; the painting was still. Susan couldn’t see his eyes.
I made a bargain, she thought, staring at the ceiling of the room where she’d given prayer. A bargain was made.
Her father withdrew her from school, had the servants bring her books to read when she could. When she got tired of reading—alone, the house a harmonic soup of creaks and sounds and drafts, advance honor guard of spirits gathering in the hallways just outside her bedroom—Susan stared at the image through a red mist of death fever. She stared at the man from the painting. He was the woman’s lover; for the first time she realized that. These were lovers, tied together. He was pale, you got the sense tall if he unbent himself from his chair, plum-red lips the only warm color in the whole composition so that everything pulled your eye straight to him. There was some awful demon in the papers on his desk that was his and his alone. And the woman’s job, like a beam of moonlight, was to lead him out the window to freedom.
Susan imagined taking the woman’s hand, and together they could walk deeper into the image, deeper into the hallway, where the woman would show Susan her life. Plants she was potting, watching grow into monsters. A dog she’d raised. Rumpled bedsheets heated by a warming pan. Notes written to herself in a journal, in secret. A whole hidden life, a consolation.
She speculated about what the instant of death might feel like. It would hurt for a moment, as if a scab as large as her body was tearing away. Her weightless soul would slide out of the bed and fall feet first into the frame of the picture, her nightgown billowing around her legs from the movement of air as if she was wading into a lake. She imagined her soul floating through starscapes, clouds of fleshy, pale angels opening their mouths and letting protopsychedelic waves of rainbow paint gush like thought balloons from their lips. At last she would disappear into a dark, dying star, rise through a column of pure light, and appear from the inkwell on the man in the painting’s desk like a tubercular Tinkerbell. She would slowly grow, slowly grow pale, silently walk to the back of the office where she would tap the woman in the painting on the shoulder. They would look at one another a moment, nod, not speak. And then they would trade places: Susan would assume the woman’s position watching the man, stuck together in linseed and pigment for eternity.
One night she woke up to find her mother watching her, silent in the corner of the room, at the door between the painting and the lamp. She couldn’t see her mother’s eyes either, only feel them. Somehow she knew her mother was looking at the things she’d drawn invisibly in the air.
Her mouth was becoming more and more difficult to move, but she did so then, began to sing the prayers she’d devised with whatever breath she could muster. Her mother heard her.
The next day, the painting was gone. In its place hung an oversaturated pastel of a girl with honey locks, striped leggings, and dreamy eyes, swinging in the dead center of a gilt oval frame. Susan stared at it. She tried, again, to still all of her thoughts—to be very quiet until the hiccups stopped—and to her surprise, she found she could do it.
She began to improve; she could get out of bed now, sometimes. She kept this secret: waited until all sound of the family’s presence in the rest of the house had stilled, and then she had to creep out of bed and down the hallway, heat clicking wetly from radiators, silent ghost moving through the same halls her mother was elsewhere, haunting.
Finally she found the painting. It now hung opposite a credenza with candles and a small dish for visitors’ cards, empty, a cabinet full of hunting rifles on loan from her uncle flanking it. Susan stood and stared at it. She moved her mouth, praying, but the prayers no longer worked; she could no longer remember their tune. And eventually she got scared her mother would find her, and she hastened back to bed on dying legs.
Late flu carried her mother away the next year. Her father found a new bride—younger, compliant—and the house stopped changing, and Susan never prayed again, forgot her songs. Much of the incident disappeared, its contours warping and collapsing in on one another like candle wax every time the flame of her memory sparked. Repetition changed the memory’s contours, too: made it stranger, more magical than it had probably been. Whatever had actually happened to her remained buried beneath waves of overdub.
But she still remembered one clear moment. She woke up to find that the man in the painting had turned to her. He had looked at her, his eyes at once like her father’s and like her own. And she knew suddenly that there was a violence in the world—an old sin that was propagating forward in time like a cresting wave—and that her life was being claimed in service against it, to ride it, to help it break. She had no choice.
She thought: one day, marriage will happen to me.
Love, Gala